Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of ... - Yuuyami.com

direction. Slash has been explored by several scholars, often opposing each
other in an attempt to “translate” the meaning of slash to their academic
audience in general and their field in particular:
Men are the alien, the other. Surveys conducted within the
community, as well as my own observations, indicate that a
high percentage of the women in fandom were not involved
in relationships with men at the times the surveys were
taken, and many considered themselves celibate. Some of
these were divorced, or post-relationship but others had
never had a long-term, loving, sexual relationship with a
man. A small but still significant number of the women in
media fandom suffer from extreme, health-threatening
obesity, and that group tends to cluster in the homo-erotic
genres. (Bacon-Smith 1992:247)
Camille Bacon-Smith sees slash fandom as a subset of the fanfiction industry,
and as a general playground for women. Based on her research at conventions
and panels she sees slash fans as conversely 1) identifying with one of the
men in the fictionalized relationship: “Many slash fans declare they write
about men together because men, holding power, can relate to each other as
powerful equals” (Ibid. 249), or 2) benefiting of the lack of a character they
would have to identify with:
Equally important, as one slash writer reminded me, no one
expects her to have firsthand knowledge of male-male sex.
A few fans, including some married women, have privately
admitted that they don’t write heterosexual erotica because
they are afraid everyone will know that they have been
“doing it wrong all this time. (Ibid. 248)
The main point in these theories lies with contemporary gendered
stereotypes: Slash enables women to play out ideas of a relationship of
16